Edit Attributes on multiple files at once

[sean-gugler]

Bulk-editing files to make them all read-only is fairly tedious in CiderPress II 1.0.2

Hotkeys for the Access checkboxes would greatly help; see issue #25.

Thinking bigger, it would be splendid if multi-selecting several files still allowed the Edit Attributes dialog to come up. Any changes made would affect all selected files.

Probably some significant effort needed in the UI to support this.

• Visual representation of "multiple-value" elements (three-state checkboxes instead of just two-state, grey empty edit fields, etc.)
• Code changes from reading/writing a single file (easy) to aggregate reads and writes (harder).
• Disallow editing filename, which must be unique, or introduce some kind of bulk renaming with serial numbers or pattern-matching modification (see Beyond Compare by Scooter Software).

[fadden]

A bulk-edit dialog is doable, though I'd probably just disable filename editing.

The CLI could probably use a similar feature. The set-attr command is currently defined as operating on a single file, taking a list of attribute-change arguments.

One of my "TO DO" list items is to make the file list double-click behavior configurable. That would allow you to double-click on an item to edit its attributes instead of opening it in the file viewer.

[fadden]

FWIW, the CLI now provides a way to bulk-edit attributes, as of v1.0.4-dev2.